Prenda Law Issues Subpoena For IP Addresses Of Every Visitor To Critic Blogs For The Past Two Years

from the what-are-they-smoking? dept

This is rather incredible. We already wrote about Prenda Law's series of defamation lawsuits against commenters on two key blogs that have been instrumental in exposing their shenanigans: FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie. While John Steele has dismissed his claim, the other two suits are still moving forward as far as I know. And now it's come out that Prenda Law's Paul Duffy sent a ridiculously broad subpoena to Wordpress demanding every IP address of every visitor who has visited either site since the beginning of 2011. Basically, they're looking for everyone who has ever visited either site:

Our client is requesting all Internet Protocol addresses (including the date and time of that access in Universal Coordinated Time) that accessed the blogs located at dietrolldie.com and fightcopyrighttrolls.com between January 1, 2011 through the present. Please provide this information in an Excel spreadsheet.

The subpoena is from Paul Duffy, so it's a bit ridiculous to claim "our client" since he is the client. This seems like a pretty clear abuse of the subpoena process, though, coming from Prenda Law, whose specialty is doing anything it possibly can to get IP addresses, perhaps it's no surprise. The subpoena was issued in association with the original claim that was filed in state court. The cases have all been removed to federal court, and hopefully the lawyers at Wordpress know better than to just cough up this info like that. Even more ridiculously, Duffy tries to claim that this is an "emergency" so they shouldn't waste any time in handing over the info:

Due to the emergency nature of the requested information, it is imperative that your organization responds to the subpoena immediately. The requested information is perishable and vital to the claims asserted in a complaint alleging widespread and systematic defamation.

What hogwash. They're looking for data going back to January of 2011. If Wordpress has logs going back that far, it's not like they're suddenly going to disappear. And, of course, the "widespread and systematic defamation" claims are already pretty questionable.

It's not difficult to look at this and see a likely attempt at creating chilling effects to try to scare people off from visiting those sites. Considering that Prenda has been collecting all sorts of IP addresses in its various copyright trolling lawsuits, can you imagine what they might do if they can cross reference IP addresses of visitors to those sites with the IP addresses they've already sued over?

Um, guys... really...

If this case was removed to Fed Court prior to the subpoena, then the Superior Court has no jurisdiction, and it was issued with that knowledge, and that's a big problem. If it was issued prior to removal, then it should have been withdrawn, as now there's no jurisdiction, and that's a big problem.

And ... it demands production 10 days from the date the subpoena issued, seven after service, although by statute,they need to give 20 days ...

"It shall command compliance . . . on a date that is no earlier than 20 days after the issuance, or 15 days after the service, of the deposition subpoena, whichever date is later." CA CCP §2020.410(c)

And why is the Complaint attached? Just to make a point? And what is the sudden urgency that the rules don't matter? Urg! Makes you wanna tear your hair out.

Next thing that will happen is Penda law doing a subpeona for all the IP's of every visitor to have visited techdirt. After all everyone who visited techdirt must be committing copyright infringement and those that left comments on articles about Prenda Law must all be defamation right (sarcasm).

Please Lord

Please, please, please, please., please Lord let them come after me. I need to put a fuck up on some fucktards. It's been a while since that last time and I so need the mental and legal stimulation to just fuck up some idiots. Please, Please, please Lord!

"Due to the emergency nature of the requested information, it is imperative that your organization responds to the subpoena immediately. The requested information is perishable and vital to the claims asserted in a complaint alleging widespread and systematic defamation."

Re: Excel spreadsheet?!

Ha ha! My thought exactly! Excel spreadsheets only hold 65536 rows. Prenda Law's behavior has been so remarkably stupid, inept, and apparently illegal so far, that I'm pretty sure that there've been 'way more than 65536 visitors! And now they'll presumably be interested in me :-) OTOH, maybe the subpoena's parties can file their return with 1 entry per Excel spreadsheet or Excel file :-).

Maybe they should just skip all the individual filing and contact the interwebs directly. That way they can get every IP of every person who ever used the web. Sure would save the expense of filing fees.

We've got it backwards.

All this time we THOUGHT Prenda was about copyright trolling, but it turns out that they are WAY smarter than that. The copyright trolling and courtroom antics were just bate to get us to laugh at them and make comments to provide them with unbounded "proof" of defamation of "character". Of course, I apparently have a different definition of "character" than they do, but hey... to each his own.

Re: 4,294,967,296 (IPv4)

St. Clair County, Illinois

Interesting that the original suit was filed in St. Clair County, Illinois, which is a notorious defendant's judicial hellhole, especially for class action lawsuits. St. Clair County is known as "America's Asbestos Court" because only a tiny percentage of the massive numbers of asbestos claims filed there are filed by plaintiffs who actually reside in St. Clair County. (Neighboring Madison County is not much better.)

Every IP address? Hahaha, have fun. They're working off the assumption that every one of their readers actually comes from America. What're they going to do; strong-arm other countries into extraditing foreign readers? Bet that'd just make out_of_the_asscrack jizz in his molested little pants.

Re: The more I jibe at Mike, the more obsessed with Prenda he gets.

Another day, another post you can't even pretend to argue with and resort to purely insulting people. Time to come to terms with your own mortality, because you've reached the end of your troll lifespan.

Re: Um, guys... really...

Wordpress (Automattic) might NOT control the domains of either of the two url's.

Though it does look like Automattic was used to register DietrollDie, and therefore that domain MIGHT reside on a host server controlled by Automattic.

FightCopyrightTrolls on the other hand looks like it is totally separated from Wordpress servers on a completely separate host server (ie: WP was just installed - it's a software program when it boils down to it) and if that is the case then Automattic has no ability to provide any IP logs whatsoever.

The other problematic (though more a logistic problem) thing I can see is the requested format of supplied information. Excel (unless they classify CSV files as excel) can not be used here since any log files of IP address's specific to the requested information would far exceed the limitations that Excel has. They could place it all in a huge CSV file but Excel would only read part - though since the format of Excel is specified in request then any information they receive is already suspect to reliability.

Re: Re: 4,294,967,296 (IPv4)

On the serious side (the one not aching from laughter) how can any law firm subpoena the sources of sites doing legitimate reporting and story discovery (FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie) using a public forum process. Even if the posts are not reporters themselves they would certainly be legitimate sources.

If these clowns actually had a defamation, or whatever complaint, case they would have to provide specific details for every instance. Is there any precedent for the type of generality described?

Re: Re: 4,294,967,296 (IPv4)

I have to argue against WordPress's policy of storing a clients site's format page only on their home server and the rest of the sites page is hosted elsewhere on a paid for server.

If you look at a DieTrollDie URL request it starts with *.DieTrollDie.com, *.wp.com, (and others) of which any discernig web crusader would of course notice and add them to the block list. The site looks funky without the formatting but who cares anyway? You can miss a lot of content but for general locked down web browsing its cool. (for most)

For sensitive sites vulnerable to an outright information, by hostile legal groups, grab I wold recommend using another forum program of which there are many. Why make yourself vulnerable to such nonsense when you can at least reduce the liability risk. WordPress is slick but it obviously creates extra risk. It is kind of like EA's always online policy but in a much smaller way. I wonder if there is a setting on the WP server site settings that would prevent this type of URL leak. (getting out of my experience so will shut up)

I understand the bandwidth considerations and they are severe so there is no easy solution. It's another privacy issue related to the immaturity of the information age.

Re: Re: Um, guys... really...

Yo, G: It's true that if it were a wordpress.org driven, then WordPress wouldn't be hosting at all, but would be for wordpress.com.

Re the Excel issue: The subpoenaing party can specify the desired format for the production, but the producing party does not necessarily have to create documents in that format. They just have to produce in the format as kept in the ordinary course of business. (I hope that's tractor-feed printouts, but that's wishful thinking.)

IP addresses are only marginally useful.

An IP address doesn't always identify an individual.

The entire multinational corporation that I work for shows up under the same European IP address, for example, even though many of us are located in other parts of the world. It drives geolocation attempts based on IP address crazy. :-)

Re: Re: Excel spreadsheet?!

I recently received a CSV from a client with 750,000 rows of data in it. Couldn't open in excel because there were too many columns and too much content within some of those that the resulting combined processing power necessary was not within Excel. Maybe it would be on a super-computer. I ended up having to open it up in MS Access. So I guess the issue is whether Hansmeier or his brother the other "technician" would be intelligent enough to know how to do that.

Maybe one of them or their cronies are reading this comment thread and now they know. So if it gets that far, I'll have to send them an invoice for this consulting service.

Re: The more I jibe at Mike, the more obsessed with Prenda he gets.

This OOTB fella-me-lad really needs to get a life. I suppose he must get some sort of gratification by airing his crackpot anti-this and anti-that troll-ish views at the drop of a hat. Doesn't sound as if he has an original thought in his head. Anyway - must fly now. Run out of troll food.

Re:

Re: Logic Flaw

1 - I want my nickel.
2 - They want to cause more fear in their targets.
3 - They want to scare those of us who speak out.
4 - They hope that they can show the court this long list and make it appear that kajillions of people saw all of the defamatory remarks so they can demand more.

Re:

the last part would be incorrect. they at least know enough to run geo reports on the IP to remove out of country IPs from the list. they have done so in the past since including foreign IPs would undermine their credibility and also point out their stupidity

Re: Re: Um, guys... really...

really? total failure here. name server records for both sites list wordpress, so what does that say? you wasted all that time thinking and writing but failed to check the basic things. next time, study harder since you need it